Jung's Concept of Individuation

An understanding of the dynamics of personality and of the psyche was limited at first by singleminded focus on pathological phenomena and on the protective dynamics of the ego. Early psychoanalytic theory dealt with pathology, and ego function was seen primarily in the light of the ego as mediator of the conflicting demands of instinct and external reality, and incidentally as protector of its own conservative attitude. This essentially biopsychological and defensive-protective view of the psyche and of the ego failed to take into consideration the creative aspects of psychological functioning, a failure that eventually required the development of ego psychology, with its recognition of adaptive, creative, and nonpathological ego processes.

Such processes were of course seen by early ego psychologists in the context of individual psychology and of the individual ego. This bias toward a psychology of the individual derived from an ontological position with a long history in Western civilization. The central focus of Western and eventually European-American thought on individual identity, an orientation avoided by most other societies throughout history, while beneficial in many ways, unfortunately guarantees the present split between so-called “scientific” psychology and deeper spiritual questions of the broader meanings of human existence and of man's relationship to the larger universe, both inner and outer.

However, the recent development of object-relations theory obviates the need for a strict ego psychology, replacing ego with the concept of self, and with the vicissitudes of self in its relation to the world of objects that it perceives as outside of or other than itself. Self in this context is defined phenomenologically, that is, as “I” or “myself” as experienced by the individual. This shift in theoretical model from ego psychology to object-relations theory is a fundamental paradigm shift of the type described by Thomas Kuhn (1970), a shift in this instance